Opinion The MAGA persecution complex is eating itself to death
But with Donald Trump out of the presidency and his allies in Congress mired in infighting, we’re now seeing what happens when the zone gets so flooded with excrement that it threatens to drown the MAGA movement itself.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chaired a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week that purported to expose the FBI’s “weaponization” against conservatives. But GOP lawmakers floated so many allegations and conspiracy theories that the spectacle devolved into a haphazard, scattered mess with no storylines developed in meaningful depth.
After months of these hearings, it’s painfully clear they lack anything close to the focus of the congressional investigations into the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, during Barack Obama’s presidency. As a result, these proceedings are unlikely to produce the political benefits that the Benghazi hearings did.
Blame it on the “MAGA persecution complex” — the vast array of outlets in the right-wing media ecosystem that incentivizes GOP lawmakers to pander to conservative victimization and grievance. It’s feasting on so many claims of persecution that it’s essentially eating itself to death.
At last week’s hearing, Republicans alleged that the FBI investigated conservative parents at school board meetings. (That’s entirely baseless.) They insisted FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, a registered Republican, personally sicced the FBI on conservatives. (Wray called this “insane.”) They claimed the FBI has eagerly persecuted Trump. (The FBI has actually been rule-bound and cautious.) They railed that FBI plants incited the Jan. 6, 2021, attack. (The central evidence of this has collapsed.)
Republicans even insisted the FBI is riddled with anti-Catholic bias based on a field-level memo about radical right-wing Catholics that is indeed problematic. But Wray admitted to a serious error, declaring it subject to internal review. Presenting one example of abuse at a huge agency as proof of another vast conspiracy is silly.
The barrage of these allegations and others — the FBI is covering up President Biden’s bribery, it’s investigating would-be GOP informants, it’s colluding with social media giants to censor conservatives — is dizzying. Storylines eclipse each other before any can gel into something coherent.
“Good oversight may start with a theory, but it gathers facts before reaching conclusions,” Brendan Buck, a former senior House GOP leadership aide, told me. “These committees are starting with conclusions and then trying — and mostly failing — to find facts to support them.”
Republicans are trying to tell one story about the persecution of conservatives that has fractured into a thousand subplots. By contrast, once the GOP-controlled House hit on Benghazi, the focus on that story was far tighter.
Kurt Bardella, a former House GOP communications adviser who has turned on the party, points out that at the time, lawmakers had fewer incentives to seek viral moments by hijacking specific narratives for themselves. Hearings could be more coordinated toward influencing mainstream news coverage.
“Nowadays, if you want to have a moment, you say something outlandish, put it up on social media,” Bardella told me. “All the right-wing platforms will amplify it for you.” That encourages freelance messaging and disunity, he noted.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton — the central character in the Benghazi hearings — was widely distrusted by reporters (to catastrophically unfair effect) at the outset. It’s hard to quantify the impact of those hearings, but a years-long drumbeat about vague corruption, amplified in mainstream coverage, probably took a toll.
Contrast that with today. Yes, the public is sour on the FBI. The agency did make serious mistakes during the Trump years. But voters are being asked to hate a villain that’s far more baroque and insidious than “mistakes were made.” The enemy is either absurdly nebulous (the “deep state”) or fantastical (thousands of federal officers conspiring against conservatives).
It also clashes with how the FBI has long been perceived in mainstream culture, noted Tim Weiner, author of a history of the agency. It’s a “very White, very male, very conservative law enforcement agency,” Weiner told me, and Republicans are trying to portray it as “antifa in a Brooks Brothers suit.”
That’s a tough sell. But as Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein notes, this conspiratorial rhetoric has become party-wide dogma. Repeating it earns party approval, creating a self-reinforcing effect.
Also, mainstream media outlets appear inclined to cover Trump-aligned conspiracy-mongering with more skepticism than the Benghazi hearings. Matt Gertz has detailed for Media Matters that attacks on the FBI have taken on a Keystone Kops quality: New whistleblowers and revelations are forever promised to reporters and never materialize.
Finally, Jan. 6 sharply illustrated the true stakes of the situation: Many on the far right did commit serious crimes against the country. While Trump-loyal Republicans are handwaving it all away, law enforcement is meting out appropriate accountability. This probably inclines news organizations to cover right-wing attacks on law enforcement more harshly than Benghazi.
But no matter: The zone-flooding conspiratorial antics will keep on coming. The MAGA persecution complex requires no less.
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